Oh my god. I am shaking with RAGE from reading this. What kind of monster sics ICE on kids in elementary school?????

Yes. At least they do in the Caribbean. Not like we have a massive amount of beer choice here.

This is a great essay.

Seconding the advice to find a good training class. My GSD is amazing, but he was my first dog and he was a rescue from an unknown background, and I definitely hit a rough patch a few weeks in to owning him. Specifically, he went from Mr. Mellow to Mr. Protective and I had no idea what to do with this growly bark…

That’s good advice. And both dates I tried were indeed “fuck it, how bad could it be?” 1st one - not bad. And I might have followed up, but I was moving out of the country so....

Aw, don’t be so hard on yourself. You are doing a lot of things right. And it sounds like your fur balls are going to get along just fine.

Never, ever feel bad about seeking some happiness after a shitty situation. He sounds lovely!

That’s true, you can be. Thanks for the correction.

You’re right. Thanks for the correction.

As far as I know, he had to have some kind of oral lesion in order to have active virus to transmit. But it could have been a small sore on his tongue or the inside of his cheek and maybe he didn’t even realize that the “cold sore” was actually HSV1. 

Also, it’s usually associated with children. Kids with active infections in the form of cold sores can transmit the virus to their skin through saliva to themselves or to other kids (like in a daycare situation). This is also why Herpes Whitlow (lesions on the fingers and thumbs) is associated with thumbsucking in chil…

Must be a SkyWest thing. A few years ago I witnessed a flight attendant absolutely lose his shit on a black guy sitting in the single bulkhead seat on a regional jet. The guy’s crime? Not putting his bag into the overhead bin immediately. I think the passenger just didn’t realize that he couldn’t have his bag on the…

Oh, you must have been the guy at the lesbian bar who took one look around and said to his buddy: “Wow, I guess it’s Ladies’ night”

Giving a shout-out to Good Dog Houston - Limited, but well-balanced and clearly labeled rotating selection of local beers on tap. Offer pints and half-pints with free tasting samples. Barleywines and super-special high octane beers in appropriate smaller portions.

The Houston microbrew scene took a very long to time to develop compared to the rest of the country (when I moved there in 2006 there was one local microbrew - St. Arnold’s - and when I left this year there were>30). I think one good thing about this is that many of the newest breweries are avoiding the IPA craze.…

This is spot on. Also, makes me miss my former just-down-the-street restaraunt in Houston. They always had 10-12 Texas local beers on tap, and always had a great mix of styles, with ABV and a quick description for every one. You could purchase a pint or a half-pint (loved that at lunchtime before heading back to work).

Love that. When I lived in a gentrified neighborbood in Houston, every few months or so the new folks would get nervous about black/brown/non-hipster people walking on the sidewalks and make noise about starting a neighborhood watch group. My husband and I decided that this hypothetical group should be called the Woodl…

You’d be surprised. They go missing in Houston all the time. You just need two guys with a van and scrap metal prices high enough to be worth the risk.

That movie is far better than most people have been led to believe.

FWIW, when Mike Pence came to visit Johnson Space Center in Houston, NASA had to shut down their in-house TV feed because more than one employee hijacked the system to broadcast anti-Pence messages.